The sentencing was the culmination of a year-long drama that began after the December 1978 raid on the club. The highlight of the legal maneuvering—which began in earnest after Studio’s third (and least public) co-owner, Jack Dushey, pleaded out and gave the government enough information to indict his partners—came when Rubell and Schrager tried to save themselves by throwing White House chief of staff Hamilton Jordan under the bus. They offered the government proof that the high-ranking Carter aide used cocaine twice, in 1977, at the club. The gambit didn’t help their defense, but it did set off a five-month, federal grand jury investigation of Jordan. He was later cleared of wrongdoing—prosecutors intimated that Schrager failed a lie detector test—but the Jordan scandal was another blemish on the Carter reelection campaign and may very well have laid the groundwork for Republican antidrug scapegoating during the eighties. It was certainly the first time candidates Reagan and Bush came to realize the political usefulness of drug charges.
The night before Rubell and Schrager were to be sentenced, they were feted one last time at Studio 54. More than two thousand people reportedly showed up for the farewell party, which was hosted by Halston, guested by Liza Minnelli, Richard Gere, Reggie Jackson, Bianca Jagger and Andy Warhol, and highlighted by Diana Ross singing from the DJ booth.
On Friday, January 18, 1980, Rubell and Schrager were sentenced to three and a half years in prison and fines of $20,000 each. The party was over. “Steve Rubell was responsible for some of the last good times in New York City,” said photographer Peter Beard. “They had to put him in jail to stop them.”
When she returned from Florida, Gia sensed immediately that something was very wrong at the agency. Wilhelmina was sick. It had begun with a miserable cold that became a
persistent cough. Antibiotics weren’t helping. As Gia was leaving for Paris to do the collections for
Vogue
with Andrea Blanche, the consensus was that Willie probably had bronchitis.
The shots in Paris didn’t go well. Gia was there for four days, including her twentieth birthday on January 29, but
Vogue
ended up with only one usable shot of her. “I remember being out at two
A.M
. looking for her all over Paris,” recalled Edward Tricomi, who did hair for the sitting. “I finally dragged her back to the hotel and she went to sleep, but she was still crazed. She had a huge fight with Andrea the next day and just walked out and flew back to New York.” When Gia returned, with just a free weekend before leaving on another
Vogue
trip, she found out that Wilhelmina had been admitted to a hospital for observation.
On Tuesday, February 5, Gia left JFK for a week on the Caribbean island of St. Barthélemy—or St. Barts, as it was known—which was quickly becoming the fashion industry standard for paradise. The former French colony had been discovered by some of the French Mafia photographers, who were trying to buy houses there. The
Vogue
sitting, with Polly Mellen, was one of the Scavullo crew’s infrequent road trips. Scavullo didn’t especially like working outside his studio anymore—too much could go wrong—but he “did it because of Gia,” recalled Sean Byrnes. Gia could now pick the jobs she wanted to do, and she had made it known that there was a better chance she would accept a booking if it involved working outdoors on a sunny island.
On the boat ride from St. Martin to St. Barts, Harry King snapped pictures of Way Bandy and the models: Gia, Kim Alexis and Jeff Aquilon. King, who hoped to one day make the leap from hair to photography, had begun doing some test shots privately with Gia to put together a portfolio. “I was inspired by her beauty and her body,” he recalled, “and all I wanted to do was shoot those titties of hers.”
Everybody was very relaxed on the ride over until Sean Byrnes found something that had dropped out of Gia’s bag. “She dropped her drugs and I found them and threw them overboard,” Byrnes recalled. “And she got hysterical.” Byrnes was no stranger to drugs himself, but he knew the effect they could have on an outdoor shooting, where so
many extra things could go wrong—things that would likely be blamed on him. “Francesco loves the morning light,” he said, “and if the girls are taking drugs all night there’s no way they’re going to get up and look good at five in the morning.
“Gia didn’t know that I did it, and, at first, she was ready to leave. I thought it was coke, but it wasn’t.”
Polly Mellen saw that there were going to be behind-the-scenes problems with the trip. But she also saw how beautifully the pictures were going, and how well Gia worked with Scavullo, Bandy and King. “I don’t consider whether a girl is difficult or not difficult,” Mellen recalled. “If she’s good, I work with the difficulty. Gia was very vulnerable, it was part of the beauty of her photographs. She gave you back something wonderful. There’s never been anyone that had what she had. And she was just at the right time. She had that boy-girl thing, and it was sexy—it was
everything.
She was absolutely dynamite.
“Gia had a very brilliant future in modeling. And that isn’t true of every girl who gets into
Vogue.
Some models will never make it, they just aren’t big-time, but they can work for a certain picture, a certain situation, and then that situation passes. For example, there was a girl, her name was Katherine Redding. We were looking for a redhead and Dick [Avedon] called and said, ‘I think I found one.’ We used her and we did ten pages on her and never used her again. She was used by other people, but I didn’t use her again because she didn’t appeal to me anymore … it’s a whim … That’s terrible, don’t you think? Terribly hard on a girl. A girl can
work
for you for a moment and then … I think that’s terribly hard.
“But that wasn’t Gia’s situation. Gia was really dynamite … even though she was really sick in a lot of ways. I knew her background was difficult, but I didn’t know she was a lesbian for a long time, until the St. Barts trip. And it was really a problem. In other words, she couldn’t satisfy herself … and she was very, very aggressive. You couldn’t room her with another girl. If you did, she made advances and the other girls would come and speak to me. You had to keep her away from other beautiful girls and you had to watch her
very carefully if she went out at night—if you were going to see her again the next day.”
No matter how difficult Gia’s behavior, the pictures were exceptional. Scavullo considered one shot of her being tackled, nude, in the surf by Jeff Aquilon, to be one of the best shots he had taken in his career: natural, alive, unpretentious.
Vogue
didn’t use the shot. It finally ran,
very
small, in an unrelated, generic sunskin story months after the other St. Barts pictures were published. But Scavullo had the photograph blown up and framed. It would forever dominate the southern wall of his Manhattan studio.
Gia was frantic to leave St. Barts as soon as she could, but anxious and frightened about what she would find out when she got back home: “I wish & I don’t wish I was in NY,” she wrote in her datebook. By the time she returned, Wilhelmina’s condition had worsened. The doctors were no longer talking about bronchitis. Even though Willie had always been a heavy smoker, the diagnosis was still shocking: she had lung cancer. The malignancy had reached an advanced stage—it was inoperable, and it was unclear whether any treatment at all was possible. She could die very soon. She was only forty years old. She had a twelve-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son. She also had an agency of 285 women and 85 men who looked to her as a professional role model. But few of those models had as much invested in their relationship with their boss as Gia did. Gia was one of the only models whose professional and personal welfare had never truly been delegated to one of Wilhelmina’s employees. She had always been one of Willie’s pet projects.
“That was an unusual situation,” recalled Kay Mitchell, “because the Patti Hansens and Shaun Caseys
liked
Willie, but I was the one that spent most of the time with them. But Gia related to Willie and Willie related to Gia. Willie, I think, felt how fragile she was and that she needed special attention. When Gia had problems, she would go right to Willie. Gia became a softer, sweeter person when she was with Willie.”
On her first day back in New York, Gia did errands to try to get her mind off Willie’s condition. “See about flowers,” she wrote in her datebook. “Mail rent tel., Con Ed.… Take clothes
to cleaners … call Sandy … call Mommy … buy incense and beautiful burner … read ‘Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ … Get Heroin.” Over the next week, she didn’t really work. She tried to get her apartment in order and played around with the drugs she bought.
She would later tell several different stories about how she had come to try heroin—which she was still only snorting. In one version, she had first snorted it socially. In another version, somebody had sneaked up and “needle-popped” her at a party: shot the heroin quickly into a muscle in her arm. In both versions, she had been absolutely overwhelmed by the quality of the high. It was like everything she had ever loved about Quaaludes, but better. It was the greatest feeling, or lack of feeling, she had ever had in her life.
After one of her first completely idle weeks in over a year, Gia took a booking in Boston for Jordan Marsh. She was so out of it that she missed the first two Eastern Shuttles and then was nearly arrested trying to get through the metal detector to board the third. She was carrying a switchblade. And when security wouldn’t let her take it on the plane, she made a scene and called the agency screaming, “He took my knife, he took my rucking knife!” Karen Hilton was finally able to calm her down: the agency, she assured her, would be happy to replace the knife if she just got on the plane. Gia finally went to Boston to make her $1,250.
The knife episode convinced top people at Wilhelmina that Gia was out of control—even for a pampered top model. In between her four appointments the next day, Gia was asked to come in and speak with Karen Hilton, who suggested she get some help. Hilton recommended her husband Robert, a part-time actor and drug counselor who was trying to decide which was a more realistic career. Since the Hiltons had moved to New York, he had been doing soap operas and informally counseling some of the lesser-known models who were buckling under the pressure. Bob Hilton was a recovering heroin addict himself, so the girls knew he more than understood what they were going through.
Gia succeeded in deflecting Karen Hilton’s suggestions. “She was great at promising, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’” recalled Wilhelmina executive Fran Rothschild. “She had some cute,
cunning ways about her. She crawled underneath your skin, with just a smile. Professionally, she was in trouble from day one. Willie tried to tame her like we all did.”
Under normal circumstances, the agency might have tried to be more insistent—even though “tough love” was becoming an increasingly risky managerial technique as girls learned how easy it was to switch agencies. But Gia’s drug use, no matter how menacing it suddenly appeared, was not high on anyone’s priority list. Willie’s health was everyone’s main concern—Willie’s health and, of course, the business ramifications.
The doctors did not expect the model agent to live much longer. Behind the scenes—in whispers outside her hospital room and in hushed tones on the office telephones—the battle for succession at Wilhelmina Models was already on. Even though Willie and her husband had been romantically estranged for some time, Bruce Cooper was legally supposed to inherit majority ownership of the agency if its namesake died. Everyone’s place in the agency would then depend on personal relationships with Cooper and perceived ability to retain the services of the top girls after Willie was gone. Kay Mitchell, just shipped off to California, found herself out of the loop. Karen Hilton was vying for power along with Fran Rothschild and Bill Weinberg. Rumors circulated that Willie was being urged to change her will on her deathbed to assure that her husband would be bought out by someone who actually knew how to run Wilhelmina Models and might be able to preserve some semblance of what she had built.
While all this went on, Gia found herself with plenty of free time on her hands to sit and brood. On Monday, February 25, she had only a half-hour meeting with some people for Timex about a TV ad with Avedon, nothing at all on Tuesday, and a small morning job on Wednesday, giving her nearly twelve hours to kill before going to Studio 54 to see Chuck Berry. On Thursday she had nothing but another half-hour TV job audition—this one for French Body Lotion—and on Friday, there was just a midday sunglasses ad sitting.
On Saturday, March 1, 1980, Wilhelmina Cooper died in Greenwich Hospital in Connecticut The next day, New
York’s Channel 7 went ahead with its airing of a pretaped interview with Willie on its
Kids Are People Too
program. She answered questions about skin problems and what it was like to be a model.
Gia was devastated by Willie’s death. “She was crushed by it,” recalled Kathleen Sperr. “It was the first time she ever had to really deal with someone close to her dying, someone young.” Besides the loss, Gia also felt abandonment. It was almost as if her own mother was leaving all over again. And there was no way for her real mother to really comfort her. In Richboro, Pennsylvania, Kathleen was still her mother. But in New York City, where Gia had been living on her own for over two years, Willie was her mother: Kathleen had all but abdicated her maternal role to become Gia’s biggest groupie. “Gia and I had a way of switching roles, one played the mother, the other played the daughter,” Kathleen recalled. “I guess when she was up in New York, I was the daughter.”
Gia was also unpleasantly surprised by the industry’s reaction to Willie’s demise: people seemed callous, almost completely uncaring, interested only in how the death affected their careers. It made her feel that life in the fashion business was even cheaper than she had thought. “She told me that when Willie died, a lot of people didn’t feel it,” recalled one friend. “A lot of people just took it like it was nothing. She didn’t think it meant enough to them.”